Month: June 2009

Complete with halved cupcakes,

and a small gift.

L and I picked strawberries on Monday, it worked really well actually. L was busy piling the berries into towers in the containers instead of eating them or wandering away until 2/3 of the way through. Then he snacked on a couple and played with his toys for a few minutes while I finished up.

I don’t have much freezer room, but I did want to preserve the yummyness for later on in the year. We are not big jam eaters, but a syrup for ice cream or waffles would be good. I used 1 cup of sugar to 4 cups of berries instead of the 7:4 ratio that jam recipes call for, resulting in something I will call Strawberry syrup.

I know that strawberries are not ready in Manitoba yet, so here is a photo sampling of the desserts we have been enjoying to tempt your tastebuds.

Up until about a month ago, I thought L was a different kind of kid. We didn’t have any horror stories that had to do with L getting into something he wasn’t supposed to and wreaking havoc with it. I began to think that we had lucked out. Maybe there was something about L’s temperament that kept him out of such trouble. I was wrong. He just hadn’t reached the right age yet. Last week he discovered how fun it was to give the toilet paper roll a good spin and watch it unravel, a discovery that has landed him on the naughty chair several times. Yesterday, while Pam was at work and L was having his bath, he decided that it would be fun to take the water that was in the tub and dump it out beside the tub. I’m surprised the neighbours downstairs didn’t have water leaking from their ceiling. This morning, while I was working in the kitchen, L came from the other room carrying a spool of thread he had found near Pam’s sewing machine and announced that he was putting “a string around the house.” Sigh.

We took a drive yesterday to the summit of Mount Greylock, highest peak in Massachusetts at 3491 ft. We spent some time admiring the view and then enjoyed a cookout. L liked being taller than the trees. I liked looking down on the rainbow.

We marked the end of the semester with a camping trip to the southern coast of Maine, we were gone Thursday to Sunday. According to the weather forecast it was supposed to rain Thursday, scattered showers Friday and sunny Saturday and Sunday; they were right. Rain it did, all day Thursday, Thursday night, most of Friday and Friday night. Eventually the sun did come out and we had a good time.

Knowing that it was going to rain Friday we spent a good part of the day at the Children’s Museum of Maine. L served up ice cream, drove a firetruck, fed tadpoles and dozens of other activities. That evening we did have a reprieve from the rain and roasted bratwursts and made s’mores on the fire.

Saturday the sun did come out and we spent the day near the ocean. We climbed rocks and found snails near Nubble Light,

and splashed in the waves and waded in the tidal pools of Ogunquit Beach.